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A Political Turn: Highways And Mass Transit In American Mobility History, Michael R. Fein Ph.D.

Humanities Department Faculty Publications & Research

Mark Rose’s Interstate: Express Highway Politics (1979) and Bruce Seely’s Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (1987) signaled the opening of U.S. highway politics as a field for sustained scholarly investigation. In Interstate, Rose examined the political competition among interest groups, such as truck operators, that produced the landmark 1956 highway legislation. Seely’s focus was the road engineers themselves, led by Thomas MacDonald, whose uncanny ability to present themselves as ‘apolitical’ experts paradoxically allowed them to dominate the highly politicized drafting of the main contours of American highway policy. Together these two texts opened a range of …